“Jesus Christ!” I said. “That
“Not a chance.” Xyla laughed. “The guy’s
“Huh?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, an undercurrent of impatience in her voice at having to explain such simple stuff to the older generation. “Look. No, I can’t trace it. Nobody could. He built it himself, from scratch. And he’s probably got more. . . that he’s only going to use one time and do the same thing. It probably only existed for a few seconds. It’s gone forever. Very, very slick,” she said, admiringly.
“But if you can’t find him. . . if his address is gone. . .?”
“I can’t find
“So what do we—?”
“Well, I don’t have his address, but he has mine. At least, he did. I nuked it myself, soon as I heard from him, like I told you I would. I figure, we keep playing, right? Send out another message, just like I did before. He must have known what was going to happen. That’s why he said ‘one word only,’ see? I’ll put it out there again. He
“Yeah,” I told her.
“So,” Xyla asked, her fingers poised, “what’s the word?”
I told her, playing the only card in my deck, watching the name of the ice-man pop up on the giant screen:
wesley
I tried the radio on the drive over to my place. No music that didn’t belong in elevators. No surprise. The all- news station was all-crime. No surprise there either. I tried talk radio. Mistake. Some “expert” was saying depression is America’s number-one mental illness. Chump. You want to know about America’s number-one mental illness, consult a proctologist.
Pansy was glad to see me anyway.
The next morning was so bright and crisp it made the badlands look pretty through my window. Until you looked close. Like those magazine photos of Tibet. The ones that don’t show the Chinese troops.
I thought maybe I’d start looking for the witch I needed, playing it that Nadine’s friend would come through. Then I realized. . . I didn’t know anything about the witch but her name. The name they gave her, and the name she took for herself. I knew her daughter’s name. . . but that kid would be a teenager by now. She could have moved. Disappeared, even. The only one I could have asked was the guy who got me involved with her in the first place. Julio. The one she watched die, gleeful witchfire crackling in her eyes. I still had her phone number, but it had been so long. . . .
I thought it through. Nothing. Then I worked with the singing bowl Max had given me. I never wondered why he had such a thing himself. Max can’t hear, but I know he can feel vibrations—better than anyone else I know. So, when he held it in his hands, maybe. . .
Pansy liked the sound too. I was getting pretty good at it. When I came back around, I made the decision. If she was still there, okay. If not, I’d try and trace her through her daughter. But I wasn’t going to open that coffin unless I had something to ask for.
So I went back to waiting.
Part of the waiting was sex I had with a girl named Lois. I wasn’t looking for her—she just turned up in a place I was and we went back to her apartment. If the action had been in a movie, the critics would have called the whole scene gratuitous.
“Just like old times,” she said, when we were finished.
That was the truth. She’d greeted me with “Hello, stranger,” and that’s the way I left.
I stayed down in the whisper-stream, sifting and sorting, looking for anything that could get me what I needed. That “message-board” thing Xyla told me about was nothing new. It works that way down here too. At the intersection of a few wires, I picked a rumble from a finger—someone who sets up jobs but never does them himself. Some fingers are amateurs—cable-repair guys, utility company workers, deliverymen—anyone who gets access to a house and has a chance to look around, check the security, see if there’s a dog, anything worth stealing, like that. But this particular guy was a pro, and he only fingered big jobs. An armored car, this one was supposed to be. And the finger didn’t just have the route, he had an inside man. A driver who wanted a piece of whatever haul he got “robbed” of—willing to take a few good knocks to make it look real too, and guaranteed to hold his end of the take for no less than five years before spending a penny. Sounded like gold. Unless you listened close. The way I saw it, the finger had finally gotten popped himself. And instead of diming out people who’d worked opportunities he’d pointed out in the past, the cops were using him to catch the crew who’d been doing cowboy jobs on armored cars all over the East Coast the past year or so. The cowboys didn’t seem all that organized—they’d just cut off the armored car with their own jalopy, jump out wearing ski masks and body armor, rake a full-auto burst across the windshield to get the driver’s attention, then hold up a grenade. . . high, so the driver could see what would happen if he didn’t open up. Sometimes they scored—one take was near a million— sometimes they struck out. In fact, the one driver they killed was piloting an empty truck, on his way back from a dropoff. So the FBI probably figured the hijackers for some of the White Night crowd, refinancing their coffers after so many of them had been captured last year.
I thought the feds were wasting their time. The guys they were looking for weren’t even pros themselves, so they wouldn’t be tuned in. No working pro would care if a pack of Nazi asshole amateurs went down, but the finger was marked lousy now. No matter how it played out, he was done.
I didn’t know if Lincoln was bugging Davidson for “progress-report” crap, but it wouldn’t matter. We already had his money, and Davidson wouldn’t even bother telling me about things like that.
The more I thought about it, the more I figured this Homo Erectus guy was already well away. It had only been a couple of weeks—not enough to make the fag-bashers brave again, sure—but he hadn’t done his bit for a while, so he could be anywhere.
Maybe I was right about that. Maybe it was the other stuff that brought him back. Maybe he never left.
The other stuff was copycat. It started small: A child molester just released from prison had his address published in the paper—seems he decided the only suitable housing he could find was about a hundred yards from a kids’ school. Some people paid him a visit one night. And lit a fire. It was an amateur arson, but good enough to total the house. And if the freak hadn’t moved fast, he’d have been barbecued.
I knew it wasn’t the killer’s work. So did the cops, I was sure. But the papers didn’t. And they started playing it up again.
Smart fucking move. A while back, the papers decided to do a series on the Bloods. Not the real-thing, L.A. gangsta Bloods, this was about the East Coast version—a few guys who got together in the joint, awarded themselves OG status and started talking the talk. Probably began in response to the Latin Kings and the Netas— two Hispanic gangs who formed themselves Inside for protection, the same way it always starts. But the balance had shifted. Rikers Island was more Hispanic than black now. If the Latino gangs had joined forces, they could have ruled. Naturally, that didn’t happen. When I was Upstate, it was usually black against white, with the Latins trying to stay out of the crossfire. Now it was the whites’ turn to play that role. The papers did what they usually do: interview some “spokesman” and print it all like it was gospel.
Next thing was a wave of random slashings all over the city. Usually box-cutter jobs, usually to the face. Word was that you had to cut someone to be a Blood, and all these dumb-fuck kids wanted to be in. . . so they went out slicing. And when the cops responded to the media with their usual sweep-arrest thing, they scooped a lot of nasty little weasels, but no real Bloods.
The Bloods found out the wannabes were even imitating the triangular cigarette burns that proved you were in. And so they started issuing more press releases, working the pay phones in the jailhouses to call the newspapers collect, disclaiming any responsibility for the slashings, warning the wannabes they’d be “dealt with” as