very big. The price of it seemed high.
Conover lit another in his constant stream of cigarettes. Tossing the match out the window, he let in a sudden blast of hot air and dust. His mood seemed to have grown lighter.
'I hope you don't mind, but I've a little side trip to make before we can go home. Just some business, you understand. I have a boat coming in from the south with some goodies on board: pituitary extracts, frozen retinas, a few kilos of cocaine. We wouldn't want to be late and give our neighbors the impression that we keep a sloppy shop, eh?' He laughed, amused by his own rambling. 'Besides, I believe these boys are going to try and burn me. And I wouldn't miss that for the world.'
'Yeah? What would you do for the world?' Jonny asked, feeling pleasantly numb and reckless, buzzing on the coke. Objects in the car had taken on a warm internal glow.
Conover looked at him, not without affection. 'Only a lunatic would want to run this dump,' he said. 'I'm content to farm my small bit and be done with it. L.A. has been a very good investment for me, in money and time.'
'I always wondered why you didn't move into someplace like New Hope. I mean, those people have got to have some expensive habits.'
Conover raised his ruined eyebrows. 'More than you could know,' he said. 'But New Hope is a ghost town. The corruption there is a closed system. The same families have been running drugs and data through there for generations. Old families, very powerful. We're talking here about the Yakuza and the Panteras Aureo. The families connected to the multinationals have their own internal organizations to keep their people happy and restful. There's no freedom in that sort of set-up. Little potential for growth.' He carefully ground out his cigarette and placed another in his mother of pearl holder. 'Besides, like Lucifer in the poem, I much prefer to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.'
Jonny grinned up at him. 'I thought you said you didn't want to run this dump.'
'It's all semantics. You can't buy Heaven, either.'
Outside, the sand had let up. Heat lightning crackled silently across the horizon. Inside the Cadillac, they had passed into what Jonny had come to think of as a pocket of silence, one of those odd conjunctions of time and place where conversation vanished of its own accord; at those moments, Jonny believed, all words became dangerous and banal. He had come to attach a certain sacredness to the silence. All things were at rest. It was a ritual from boyhood, no different from stepping around cracks so that he would not break his mother's back. Meaningless, he knew, but when the feeling passed, he missed it and in trying to force it back, came up, instead, with the twin images of Ice and Sumi.
'Hey Mister Conover, anything in this stuff we're picking up have to do with the new strain of leprosy?'
'No,' said the smuggler lord. 'Why do you ask?'
'I just figured you might be looking around for something. It's getting pretty bad in some neighborhoods.'
'Have you seen the epidemic yourself?' asked Conover. 'You know how these things can get blown out of proportion. With AIDS in the last century and the new hepatitis strains at the beginning of this one, people are very susceptible to rumors of a new plague. Then the Link gets hold of the talk, and broadcasts it right into people's skulls, reinforcing their belief in their own delusions. Couldn't this plague just be some mass psychogenic reaction?'
'Yeah, I've seen it. People aren't really talking plague- not yet. The Croakers have a roomful of lepers quarantined. Say this new strain is viral and that it kills, maybe through some kind of secondary infection,' said Jonny. 'We're not talking about a few hysterical whackos here. The whole city's in trouble.'
'Calm down, son,' said Mister Conover, laying a hand on Jonny's arm. 'Remind me not to give you stimulants in the future.' He smiled.
'Actually, I do know this new strain is real. Looks like a bacteria, acts like a virus and all that, right? I was just trying to get an untainted perspective. As I said, all I hear are rumors. Like in east L.A. they've taken to burning their dead. That neighborhoods are beginning to seal themselves off. The social effects of the disease are certainly real enough. Tell me, have the Croakers had any success in isolating reverse transcriptase from the virus samples?'
'You think it's a retro-virus?'
'AIDS was. And that little fellow practically had the medical community reading Ouija boards before they got anywhere.'
'What about going after it with a general virus-killer like ribovirin or amantadine?' asked Jonny.
The smuggler lord shook his head. 'That's been tried,' he said. 'Amantadine seems to have some preventative applications, but if you're already infected, it's useless.'
'You know about this new strain, don't you, Mister Conover?'
'It's my job.'
'You don't seem too concerned.'
'Personally? No. The Greenies took care of that long ago. I doubt my blood would be very appetizing to these little bastards.' He rocked with some internal laughter. 'I haven't had a cold in over forty years.'
'Then you don't know any treatments we could get hold of for the new strain?'
'No one is even sure how it's transmitted,' Conover said. 'And without the disease vector, curing a few individuals isn't going to stop an epidemic.'
Seated beside the driver in the front of the car, a hawk-nosed man with an oily pompadour turned to face the back. One of his eyes was blackened, and his upper lip was swollen badly, drawing it downward, giving him a childish, sullen look. Jonny recognized the man as the one whose teeth he had loosened with his boots earlier that evening. The man appeared to be slightly embarrassed. He would not look at Jonny.
'Scuse me, Mr. Conover, but I read un transmissor en la auto,' he said.
'Jonny, my boy, you wouldn't be wired for sound, would you?' asked the smuggler lord.
Jonny looked at him. 'Hey, you know me, Mister Conover.'
Conover nodded and turned to the front. 'What do you say, Ricos? You sure your little gadget's reading correctly?'
'Si, no cuestion. The maricon es only new baggage 'round here. I'm not reading nothin' till he get in.'
'Friend, if you can read at all I'd be surprised,' said Jonny.
Ricos made a quick grab for Jonny, but Conover shoved the man back in his seat. 'That's enough, children. Jonny, could somebody have planted something on you?'
'No,' Jonny said. 'Those Committee boys never got near me and these clothes are Croaker cast-offs. They'd have no reason to tail me to their own hideout.' He looked at Ricos, pointed to his skull 'Tu tener un tornillo flojo.'
Conover puffed thoughtfully at his cigarette, leaned forward and touched the driver's shoulder. 'Pull over up ahead,' he said.
'Ricos, bring your remote. Come on, Jonny.'
The car stopped near an old dumpsite for a mining operation that had flattened the surrounding hills. Conover slipped on a white Panama hat as he led Jonny out and around to the back of the Cadillac. Cottony tracers of gas clung to gummy, bitter smelling waste pits. The smuggler lord pointed to Jonny with his cigarette holder.
'Find it,' he said to Ricos.
Ricos moved very close to Jonny and began moving a small electromagnetic device over Jonny's clothing, tracing the outline of his body. Jonny glanced over at Conover and wondered what was going through the smuggler lord's mind, but it was impossible to read that face. He concentrated, instead, in affecting a look of extreme uninterest as Ricos studiously moved the device around his crotch.
'Ai!' Ricos yelled. He held the box to Jonny's bandaged shoulder. 'Got you, maricon.'
Jonny looked at the man and then at the box in his hand.
'Jesus,' said Jonny miserably. 'Oh fucking hell-'
'Jonny?' said Conover.
He slumped against the back of car, Ricos standing over him delightedly. It took several seconds for the image to assemble itself; it appeared to him much the way he imagined visuals formed through skull-plugs: an out of focus mass of phosphenes settling slowly, like a reverse tornado, around a central spiral. In truth, he did not want to understand it, but in admitting that, he gave the thought form and terrible substance.
