by John Shirley
Candle stopped at a booth, bought a curried vegetarian burrito and a meal-in-a-bar. He stuck the food bar in his pocket, drank a ginseng coffee and ate his burrito using the domed top of a trash can for a table; watching the crowd sift by, a flow of faces: eager, incurious, defeated, focused, hungry, jonesing, angry, amusedly tolerant.
Lots of faces but never Danny’s.
So far Candle hadn’t found anyone who’d tell him where the illegal VR was. The chances that Danny would be in the area weren’t bad, but he could be thirty feet from him, here, and not see him. And if Danny saw him first, and if he were still actively addicted, he’d go the opposite direction.
He could show Danny’s picture around, but time had passed, and Danny would have changed his look—maybe even gotten a face forming. And anyway they’d look at Candle, his clothes, his eyes, and think he was a cop or a private detective and you didn’t talk to those in Borderbust, because the cops usually lied about what they were really after.
As Candle had, while a cop, many times.
Suppose he found Danny—what then? What refuge could he take his little brother to? He had a Thirdy Card, he had no home, no pension, no resources. There was Guffin, maybe ...
No. If his old partner was still alive, he’d leave him alone. He was a good guy. He didn’t deserve to have Slakon dogging him.
Same with Tulku Kenpo. Leave Guffin alone, leave Tulku alone. Leave them alone ...
Candle put the plastic cup into the trash, throwing away most of the ginseng coffee. It was already making him jittery.
He walked on, sorting through faces on the street, hoping to get lucky, just run into Danny.
His heart was thumping now; he thought he felt his old herpes trouble buzzing and stinging at his nervous system. He should renew his nano cure for that, if he could get Public Health to pay for it, though it made his skin crawl when the microseekers crept through his nervous system, dendron by ganglion by nerve ending, looking for viruses. What might his enemies have done to him when he was UnMinded? Or even just some jughead of a prison bull. There were stories of guards tinkering with the oversight cameras so they could fuck the prisoners, make them do humiliating things, some kind of elaborate tournament in a basement room using the UnMinded as pieces on a big board game.Urban myth, probably. But who knew?
He found himself glancing over his shoulder often enough it was hurting his neck. That asshole who’d dogged him might be anyplace at all. Anywhere, anytime, really. It was probably Targer’s people, and they wouldn’t give up. By now they’d have a birdseye looking for him in likely neighborhoods.
He looked up, couldn’t see much past the streetlights. Was that a gleam of silver? A little robot bird with camera eyes? Might have been a piece of foil blown on the wind.
Going to be useless to Danny if you slide into paranoia, he told himself, as he turned down an uncrowded side street.
He searched inside himself for the old place of refuge, the throne of objectivity, the seat of the Nature Mind that his lama had helped him find.
It was still there. It was still, there. He directed his attention into the walking meditation that had kept him sane after a hundred bloody, unresolved investigations in the slums ...
There was a sharp shift of perspective, and he was no longer caught up by the flow of free-association, he was here on the street in real-time, in the present moment, and he could sense the silver back of this moment’s mirror.
Less identified, his mind could reset its priorities. He’d find Danny. First—
Two sedans pulled up out of an alley, one blocking the street to his left, the other blocking the sidewalk in front of him.
A couple of Slakon security thugs got out, one from each car, bored-looking men with shaved heads, big shoulders, hamlike forearms, topheavy chests threatening to burst their dull green Slakon jumpsuits. The latest steroids.
“Mr. Candle?”
Something silvery that wasn’t windblown foil fluttered overhead ...
Two more guys got out of the car. Halido and the guard, Benson, from the prison.
“Mr. Candle ...” said the nearer of the two thugs. “Just a word ...”
“Fuck that, hode, just clock the motherfucker,” Halido said.
Candle turned his head—and saw another vehicle rolling slowly up behind, a truck or a van, from here just a block of shadow behind headlight glare. Boxed in.
“Mr. Candle. Oh, Mr. Candle ...” An odd voice from the vehicle behind him. “You gonna go with those corporate goons?”
Candle looked at the “corporate goons” in front of him; at the rusty van in back.
“Move in on him!” Halido shouted. The goons came on—
Candle turned, slipped between the van and the wall. A side door of the old van slid open and he ducked in, the vehicle roar-ingly reversing out of the narrow street before he’d quite got his feet pulled in. His right shoe was scraped off his foot against the wall with the motion. He jerked his feet in, the van door slammed. He had just time to take in the bigger guy sitting near him on the metal floor in the back of the van, a pistol in his hand, and the little guy with the prosthetics at the steering wheel, before he found he was grabbing at the metal walls as the van reversed hard around the corner, jerked wrenchingly to a stop, roared forward, pulled a sharp left into an alley, bounced and clanged over a garbage can, and veered hard into a busy street, nearly running over an elderly Asian lady in a neurally-guided wheel chair as they drove across the sidewalk. She shouted Cantonese-Korean invectives after them as Candle sat up and looked more closely at the men in the van with him: the big loosely grinning man with a gun in his hand and a leering dwarf, and realized he was alone with a couple of guys he’d arrested more than once, as a cop, and now they were probably going to put a bullet in his head, to satisfy an old, stale urge for revenge ...
“Um—before you shoot me,” Candle said, “can we stop and get me a pair of cheap shoes? It’s about the dignity of how they find my body. You know—embarrassing if my body only has one shoe. You understand.”
“I do,” Nodder said. “I understand that.”
CHAPTER FOUR
JUS’ SNUCK UP ON YOU AND IT’S WATCHING EVERYTHING YOU DO
“Why’d you choose to come with us?” Nodder asked. The gun was loose in his hand but still pointed in Candle’s general direction. Candle was pretty sure the big guy was Nodder—anyway that was the guy’s nickname. “I mean, yeah, it was ‘the lady or the tiger’ but ...”
“The remark about corporate goons. Instant affinity, right there, man.” Candle wondered if he could make a lunge for that niner. If he remembered rightly, the guy was a narcoleptic, but he didn’t look like he was anywhere near nodding out. His eyes were shiny with excitement. And the pistol had a battery pack under the barrel—meaning charged bullets. One of those hits you even glancingly, you tend to freeze up with the electric shock, for three or four seconds. Long enough. “I have a history with Slakon and that pretty-boy prick Terrence Grist,” Candle went on. Talking about one thing, but thinking about another: that gun. He didn’t like being the guy in the situation without the gun. “There was the thing with Danny. They were making an example of him. Then I tried to trace a skim-skam he was up to when there was a freeze on his bank account. If I’d succeeded, his rivals in the 33 could have used it against him. So I had to go down ...”
“You think we lost ’em, ’Stack?” Nodder asked, without taking his eyes off Candle.
“They didn’t follow, I think we lost their surveillance, hode,” Shortstack said, still barreling the van along. He kept zigzagging through less crowded side streets.
Shortstack was someone Candle definitely remembered from the old days. Hard to forget. “No,” Candle said, “They had a birdseye on me. They’re just hanging back, letting the birds-eye follow. Probably going to cut us off somewhere.”
“Shitter-shatter, a birdseye,” Shortstack muttered.
“They don’t move as fast as a car, those things, not for long di
stances,” Candle pointed out. “If you step on it, maybe run a red light ...”
“Oh jeez, don’t tell him that, ‘Stack’s a lunatic when he’s in a hurry,” Nodder said, wincing, glancing at Shortstack—
And Candle used Nodder’s distraction to snatch the gun from his hand.
“Hey!”
Candle reversed the gun, pointed it at Nodder. “You were making me nervous with this thing.”
“What? I wasn’t going to shoot you. Probably. You worry too much Candle. Why, the Black Wind’ll get us, if the mutated malaria doesn’t. You should be more easy going.”
What’s the Black Wind? Candle wondered, as they jerked screechingly around another corner. “I’m easygoing into a fucking car crash here pretty soon ...”
“Nodder?” Shortstack scowlingly glanced back at them. “You troll, did you let him get your shooter?”
“I just looked away for a second ...”
“So what the hell do you–” Candle coughed as the car roared into overdrive through an intersection, gas fumes coming up through the porous metal floor. “Fuck! This is a gas burner!”
“So?” Shortstack said, looking in the rear view. “There’s still a lot of leakage pools of the stuff around. I pump it out, run it through a filter, get free fuel. Free is cheaper than hydrogen cells. Got to know where to look.”
Candle coughed again and persisted, “What do you guys want with me? You aren’t putting your asses on the line ’cause you’re sentimental about some cop who arrested you once.”
“I’ve got a proposition for you,” Shortstack said, spinning the wheel so the van fishtailed around a corner. Honking and shouts of fury trailed after them. “But we got to talk about it later. I don’t figure they ID’d us. This van’s plates aren’t legit. And there was rain on the windshield and ... I think if we can dodge the birdseye we’ll be safe at your bar, Nodder. Anyway we can always say we were just picking up a pal and didn’t know anything about the other thing, if they shove their snouts in there ...”
“We’ll come at it by the under-park entrance though,” Nodder said. “Hey Candle—put away the gun. No, wait—that’s my gun. Give it back.”
“When we get to the bar,” Candle said. He shoved the gun in his waist-band.
Nodder shrugged—and clutched at the wall as they veered around another corner. “I ...” He coughed from the fumes. “Are those sirens I hear?”
“Cruise flyer,” Candle said, looking out the back window. “Nice model.” He could see the flying police car, lit up and sirening, its wheels retracted, veering down between the com-towers about three blocks back. “He must’ve seen you run a couple of lights.”
Flying cars had been on the market since 2014 but they’d been too expensive for most people and a nightmare for the FAA to figure out so, in the end, they were restricted to a few special licenses granted the super rich, the Feds, and the police. Each police precinct had one, two at most. Cruise flyers were costly, and they had a tendency to crash. But they could go places choppers couldn’t and they were hard to run from. Candle had only been inside a flying car twice. Found it nauseating.
“Under-park entrance around the corner might work,” Shortstack said, and took the van up on two wheels to get around the corner without slowing. He hit the brakes, skidded, stopped, backed up, turned and suddenly they were pitching down into shadow. There was a crash as he crunched the van through a plastic barrier. Candle and Nodder reflexively clutched at one another to keep from tumbling over at the jolt.
Mildly embarrassed, Candle disengaged from Nodder, and looked down, as the van slowed—and saw Nodder had taken his gun back.
“Shit.”
Nodder pointed the pistol at him and chuckled. “Ought to give you a good shockin’ graze for stealing it. But there might be a ricochet in the van.” He stuck the gun under his rain coat as the van pulled up short, and Shortstack killed the engine.
“I don’t think the flyer saw us go down into the garage,” Shortstack said. “You can’t hardly see the entrance from above. Supposed to be shut down.”
“It was shut down,” Nodder said, climbing out. “You smashed through the fucking entrance, hode, you don’t think anybody’s going to notice that?”
“Not from up above,” Shortstack said, disengaging his legs from the driver prosthetics. “The entrance gate is inside, back from the street. Come on. But keep an eye out—it’s ‘shut down’ but people use it.”
His mouth dry, heart still pounding from the pursuit, Candle got gratefully out of the fume-choked van. “How did we ever stand those gas burners when I was a kid?”
They were in an old parking garage. There was sporadic lighting, cones of flickering glaucous glow here and there, probably maintained by the squatters who’d set up the little indoor shacks and tents clustered randomly down the length of the decaying parking structure. Candle expected to see the birds-eye, but there was no tell-tale glimmer of a flying surveillance camera in the air. He could feel dust, ancient asbestos, gathering in his mouth.
Still—the flying camera could be there. “You think we lost it?” he asked. He was more spun by the run-in with the corporate thugs than he wanted to admit to himself. Maybe he’d left his nerve back on the UnMinding table.
“Wait ...” Shortstack said. He reached into the van, under the driver’s seat, pulled out a hand-palm-sized sensor. Candle knew the device: it was supposed to warn of any birdseye transmission within five hundred yards. Along the lines of the police radar detectors sold when he was a kid. The sensors were illegal, unless they’d overturned the Surveillance Integrity Act while he’d been UnMinded. Circling the van, Shortstack watched the sensor’s small readout, frowning. He returned to his starting point, shaking his head. “Nothing in range. We lost it.” He locked up the van, stuck the sensor in the pocket of his Army coat—the coat dragged behind him on the grimy floor—and signaled for Candle to follow.
Candle started after him—then stopped, noticing Nodder, sagging against the van. “Hey, Shortstack.”
The dwarf sighed and returned to Nodder, whose eyes were rolled back, eyelids fluttering. “Nodder!”
“He’s narcoleptic, right?” Candle remarked. “Why doesn’t he get an implant for that? Last I knew they had pharm-quality pretty cheap off the Canadian black market.”
“Oh—he’s got a phobia of operations of any kind. ‘Not gonna let ’em put somethin’ in me—who knows what else they might stick in there?’ He’s paranoid. But you never do know ...”
Shortstack reached into the big man’s inside coat pocket, found a soft plastic tube, squeezed it under Nodder’s nose.
“Whuf!” Nodder snorted, his head jerking back. “Sorry. Sorry. All the excitement. Kinda crashed, after.”
“Come on, hode.” His coat leaving a trail in the dust, Shortstack strode to a glaze-eyed, half-toothless old tramp squatting on a filthy sleeping bag with his back to a crumbling gray cement column. Candle followed, walking on one shoe and one sock. The concrete was cold through the thin sock material. He figured his footwear was not necessarily out of place here.
The old tramp chuckled at their approach, flipping a razor-sharp eight-inch knife in his hands. He flipped the knife into the air, it spun glittering there three times, and fell blade-first toward his crotch; he caught it by the hand-guard; he flipped it again. Over and over.
“What search, Three Ring? Listen—you watch the van, when I come back I bring you a gallon of Alco-High.”
“And a sandwich! Falafel!”
“And a falafel sandwich. If no one in here touches my van.”
“I will whip a knife in their neck, it’ll go alla way through, come out the other side—and then–”
“Not necessary. Just threaten to do that. That’ll be better.”
“You say so. More impressive, there’s a body by the van. Keeps people off.” The tramp made a creaking noise that might have signified levity.
Shortstack tossed Three Ring a temporary buy card and strode on.
>
Three Ring squinted at the card and snorted. “Oh that’ll get me a roll of toilet paper. Big whippity.”
“The rest when I come back, like I fucking said,” Shortstack replied, without looking back.
They wended through the camps, between tents and indoor cardboard shanties; some were organized and reasonably hygienic, at others they stepped over pools of piss, ducked under drooping wires strung from retrofitted light fixtures, evaded snarling, emaciated pit bulls straining at frayed leashes. Smells of carb-heavy cooking, sweat, unwashed clothing, ammonia, marijuana, mold, feces. Candle stepping very, very carefully with his shoeless foot.
Shortstack stopped at the tent of a toothless bleached blond who might’ve been anywhere from thirty to seventy years old. Probably stim-plants or rotters had aged her early. Behind her was a wheelbarrow filled with odds and ends of dry goods, all in their original packaging. “Sandy, hey you got any shoes today?”
“Fell off the fuckin’ truck for you, Shortstack.” At least, that’s what Candle thought she said. It came out fast and mushy. “Got a bag of sneakers, that recycled vinyl fabric shit but they’ll work ... I think I got one for One-Shoe there ...”
Candle winced. Was that to be his street monicker? One-Shoe?
She found a matching pair of sneakers that were only a size too large for him, and Nodder promised to pay her in credit at his bar. Candle put the shoes on, tossed away his extra, and they continued across the encampment. The shoes were colored vomit-orange but they worked.
Somewhere a scavenged television droned earnestly about a war.
“There a war going on?” Candle asked, as they approached a trash strewn concrete stairway. The door over the stairwell had been long since stolen.
“Ain’t there usually?” Shortstack shrugged. “Indonesia—you know that Islamic hardliner bunch that took over there, they got the Liberation For Allah fever.”