“ ‘I went down to play a little craps,’ he says.
“ ‘How’d you do?’
“Guy slips under the covers, shrugs, says, ‘I lost ten bucks.’ ”
The conversation sat still for a moment. Tad said, “Okay, funny. And, uh, what exactly is the point?”
“Point is, it’s all gravy, Tad. This morning, I didn’t know the GD existed, so when I came across it, it was like something for nothing. I used it up, I had a big laugh, it didn’t cost me anything. Hell, I didn’t even lose ten bucks. I came home with as much in my pocket as when I left this morning. Except what I paid for the tofu burger for lunch.”
“You go a long way to make a point, man. And I don’t know how you can eat that tofu shit.”
“Yeah, well, getting there is half the fun, isn’t it?”
Tad had to nod. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. But you’re still a crazy motherfucker.”
“So who’s arguing with that?”
“Jesus.” A beat, then, “So how is the Zee-ster?”
“Probably as burned out as you are. He didn’t show. How you holding up?”
“I’ve been worse.”
“Want to eat something?”
“Nah, not yet. Maybe in a day or two. I’ll just pop a few pills.”
“Keep it up, Tad, pretty soon nothing short of tanna leaves is gonna bring you back.”
“Karis, the mummy, with Boris Karloff,” Tad said. Like half the people in L.A., Tad was an old-movie buff. He especially loved those old black-and-white Universal monster pictures.
“Well, at least part of your brain still works. I’m gonna get some champagne. You want some?”
“And rot my liver? Shee-it.”
Bobby laughed and said, “I’m gonna miss you, Tad.”
Tad nodded. “I know. But that was always in the cards, man. Always in the cards.”
13
Jay Gridley hiked down a country road, not far from the Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Sabine River, just across the state line from Louisiana, a place he had once visited as a child. Long-leaf pine and red dirt and lazily buzzing flies completed the summer scene. When he’d actually been here in real time, he’d been eight or so, walking with a couple of his cousins, Richie and Farah. Richie was his age, Farah was four. They had seen a long reddish snake wiggling on the road, and all excited, he and Richie had run back to tell their parents. Jay hadn’t been able to understand why his mom and Aunt Sally had jumped up in such a panic.
He smiled at the memory.
Just ahead, a white-haired old man in a dirty T-shirt and overalls — no shoes — sat in the shade of a tall pine tree and whittled on a long stick with a Barlow jackknife. Jay liked to get the small details right in his scenario work.
“Howdy,” Jay said.
“Howdy, yo’self,” the whittler said. A long wood shaving curled up from the edge of the knife blade.
In RW, Jay was querying a server for information that would be downloaded into his computer spool; but in VR, it was much more interesting.
“What’s happenin’?” Jay asked.
“Not much,” the whittler allowed. “This and that. You heard about them FBI guys got poisoned?”
“Stoned,” Jay said, “not poisoned.” He smiled. Yep, that had been a funny one. Something to wave at the Bureau boys when he ran into them in the cafeteria. The regular feebs were always ragging on Net Force about one thing or another, so any ammunition Jay could gather to pop off at them in return was good, especially since the L.A. incident hadn’t hurt anybody, only embarrassed ’em.
“Anybody come through selling snake oil lately?”
In this case, “snake oil” was a representation of the mysterious purple cap the DEA was all hot to run down. And not just them, so it seemed.
Along his way, Jay had stopped to chat with several local characters, and so far, he hadn’t turned up anything. But this time, it was different.
“Well, yes, sir, there was this fellow come through a little while ago had some of that stuff, I do believe.”
Jay’s laid-back Zen attitude vanished. “What? When? Which way did he go?”
Whittler spat a stream of something dark and icky and pointed with the knife. “He headed on up the road, over toward Hemphill, I reckon.”
“Was he walking?”
“In a horse-drawn wagon.”
Speed, he needed to get moving if he was going to track and run down the dope dealer. He looked around. He could drop out of this scenario and switch to another, or do it in RT with voxax or a keyboard… No, wait, he had a toggle he could use, a backup. He did it, and suddenly there was a moped leaning against a tree, just there.
“Mind if I borrow the bike?”
“He‘p yo’self.”
Jay ran to the moped, essentially a heavy bicycle with a motor that you started by pedaling the bike. It wasn’t a Harley, but it was faster than a horse-drawn wagon, and a lot better on a gravel road than a hog would be anyhow, at least the way he rode, even in VR.
He hopped on the moped and started pedaling.
This contemplative Buddhist stuff was all well and good, but when things started to break, you needed to be able to
The little two-cycle motor belched, emitted a puff of white smoke via the tailpipe, and started up.
The boss would be really happy if Jay could wrap this up.
Michaels was moving the boxes Guru had sent home with Toni when he came across a small, highly polished wooden one that gleamed, even under the dust. “Very nice,” he said, holding it up.
Toni glanced over from where she was piling shoes. She already had a molehill of them in the hall, the mound threatening to become a small mountain completely blocking the door to the bedroom. “Oh, I forgot all about those.”
Toni came over to where Michaels stood and took the box from him, flipped the brass catch up, and opened the lid, then turned it to show him.
“Wow,” he said.
She removed a pair of small knives from velvet-lined recesses in the box, then pulled out a shelf to reveal a hidden space under it. There was a thick leather sheath in the bottom section. It looked like somebody had chopped a third or so off the end of a banana and flattened the sides. She took the sheath out and inserted the two curved blades into it so that they rode side by side, separated only by a center strip of leather. They were all metal, the knives, and the pommel end of each consisted of a thick circle with a big hole in the middle. With a quick move, Toni pulled both blades, dropped the sheath onto the carpet, and brought her hands together. When she pulled her hands apart, each one wore a knife, with short and nasty-looking curved blades extending point forward, maybe two inches from the little finger sides of her palms. Her forefingers went through the rings on the end.
“These are a variation on
She turned her hand over, palms up, to show him.
He took a closer look. The things were short, maybe five or six inches long, and most of that was the flat
