by John Shirley
“The reverse Crusades? I thought the LFA were bombed to shreds.”
“We thought so too. Doesn’t ever seem to quite go away. Once they get that Muslim Crusades idea. Keeps cropping up. And there’s big money in those wars—some people think that the Fortune 33 have agents stirring it all up, paying the Imams so ‘The 33’ can get the Privatized Military bids, sell arms.”
Nodder chuckled. “No doubt.” He led the way to the stairs. “Up the stairs, through a hole in the wall, across a roof, and then we’re on the roof of the building that contains my cozy little establishment.”
They stepped over a snoring old woman, dressed in layers of clothing, curled asleep on the landing, clutching a small girl about seven who was sitting on a crusty sleeping bag. Scratching in her matted red hair with dirt-mooned fingernails, the little girl was listlessly watching a Smart Plastic doll that would sit up, walk around a few steps, moving all on its own. The little doll, missing most of its hair, stopped moving, peered up at Candle with tiny jewel-like eyes as he hesitated on the landing. He glanced up the stairs to see that Nodder and Shortstack, weren’t watching him, then slipped the meal-in-a-bar from his pocket, handed it to the little girl.
And hurried up the stairs before the others saw him acting like a Deezy.
But as he went, stepping over a drunken pimply youth, a reeking wad of wet newspaper, and several broken bottles, he wondered what had actually happened on the street. Halido and the muscle suits. Instinct had told him not to surrender. Guesswork told him he wasn’t supposed to have gotten out of prison.
And his gut feeling told him that if they had taken him, sooner or later they’d have killed him.
Nodder’s bar and grill was in a police station.
“It used to be a precinct station,” Nodder said, as they entered the bar from the back. “Then during the LA terrorist bombings they had to close it, when the dirty bomb went off down the street. But in fact it got no radiation, really, from the bomb. You remember ...”
“I remember a whole neighborhood got cancer, later,” Candle said. “What do you mean, ‘no radiation really’?”
“Hardly any. Don’t be such an old lady,” Shortstack said. “Barely registers on a Geiger counter anymore.”
They walked past unlocked jail cells now stacked with beer kegs, cases of liquor and bar food, and into the booking room where drinking customers, mostly men, sat around a ragtag collection of garage-sale tables; the counter where the desk sergeant had stood was now the bar. A woman bartender, her face hidden by the droop of her shiny, long black hair, was pouring another shot of tequila for a dark skinned Mexican with Aztec-styled tattoos on his face. He was swaying on his stool, already drunk.
The place was spottily papered in wanted posters and police community announcements. FIVE TIPS FOR SPOTTING IMPLANT SCAMS on old, yellowing paper. Most of the announcements had been written on. Under the heading ILLEGAL VR, MALNUTRITION AND YOU someone had scribbled, Malnutrition and who? They going to feed me to them V-rats? Old style metal handcuffs were strung like chains of Christmas tinsel on the walls just under the ceiling.
“Where’d you get the old handcuffs?” Candle asked. “They stopped using those twenty some years ago. Unless LP straps have been outlawed ...?” Localized Paralysis straps.
“We got the cuffs from a retiring dominatrix. She collected them,” Nodder said. “No indeed, LPS isn’t gone—still big with the cops. Last time I was arrested—suspicion, merely, they had to let me go—my hands stayed numb for an hour after they slung me in the cell ...”
“Happens sometimes, to some people.”
“I couldn’t eat my damn dinner with my hands paralyzed,” Nodder said, going behind the bar. “Told me to get down, eat it like a dog.”
Candle barely heard. He was staring at the little bartender who’d raised her head to gaze back at him with large black eyes. “Hi, Rina,” he said.
Rina was a Vietnamese-American woman, a slip of a woman but intense, and a practical expert at Vo Binh Dinh. Five years earlier, Candle had seen her take down two big men with the Vietnamese martial art, learned as a teenager on the streets of Saigon.
“Oh hey. Hi, Rina.” She was still a pretty little thing, he thought though her face had hardened a bit.
She pretended to spit. “Oh hey Hi Rina he says!” She had a mild Vietnamese accent. “I told you not to pull that bullshit with Slakon—all for that ungrateful brat—and I tell you not to stick around town, we go to live with my family in Hanoi–”
“Um—I thought you were from Saigon?”
“They move to Hanoi, asshole!”
“Well. Danny would’ve done real time. He had priors. He’d have done awake-time with ...” He smiled apologetically at Nodder. “... he’d have come out worse than he went in.” Something occurred to him. “Kind of a big coincidence, you working here—and these guys coming to get me.”
She pursed her lips to hide a smile. “So what, big coincidence.”
He doubted it was a coincidence. She was still mad at him but she’d probably talked them into offering him a deal, whatever it was. It’d be harder, then, to turn it down—but since Shortstack and Nodder pretty much straddled The Law and The Life, at best, there wasn’t much chance he was going to get into business with them. Speaking of which ...
He looked around. “I don’t see a business license. You got one, Nodder?”
Nodder was behind the bar, mixing a drink for a mumbling tranny with a black eye and a crooked blond wig. Nodder shaking his head: “Listen to him! The convict putting on airs about my license. You going to bust us and Rina for not having a license, convict?”
“No, I just like to know.” But it had been old cop instincts talking. Embarrassing. “Give me a fucking drink.” He wanted to press Shortstack and Nodder on what they knew about the attempt to grab him on the streets. But it was too public in here.
Candle sat on the stool next to the slumping Aztec, watching Rina making a drink; her small brown hands working with flashing proficiency. He remembered those hands on his shoulders; on his waist, his hips ...
Theoretically he’d been undercover, on a search for sex-slaves, when he and Rina got involved. When she worked for Johnny Ebo. Johnny was as cold hearted as a pimp could be, and they only came cold hearted.
Candle had dropped his cover when he’d seen Johnny pull a gun on her, accuse her of skim-skamming the flow her girls were bringing in. Pretty obvious she was going to try to kick the gun out of Johnny’s hand—which might’ve gotten her shot. So he’d shot Johnny himself, through the side of the head.
And Rina seemed to appreciate it.
“I forgive you for being cop,” she’d said, later, in bed.
Now she put a Tequila Sunrise in front of him. “I know, you think those too sweet, but that one kick your ass.”
“Okay. Long as you didn’t poison it.”
“Only one way you find out.”
She wasn’t smiling, as she said it.
But he drank deeply anyway. It didn’t feel like poison. It felt like a mother’s tender hand. “Oh man. I was UnMinded. But I swear I missed drinking anyway.”
She sniffed. “You didn’t miss nothing in jail, that way they got you in there. Like robot.”
He smiled. “But sometimes you dream. I dreamed about you, Rina.”
“Oh for crying out loud,” Shortstack said, squatting on the stool next to him. “I’m gonna heave. Jeez. Give me a drink for the love of God.”
Turning to hide a smile, Rina made Shortstack his usual.
“That UnMinding,” Nodder said. “They allege that’s a punishment. No. You wake up and it’s over. How’s that so hard?”
Candle shot Nodder a glare. He felt a kind of heaviness in his arms; a heat behind his eyes. Nodder’s remark had made him angry—and that surprised him. He wasn’t usually so touchy. “You don’t get it. You’re going along with your life and then somebody comes along with a big pair of scissors and cuts four years out of it. Just gone.”
>
Let the anger go. Don’t identify with it. And it slipped away. He was still a Buddhist. Still had the inner moves.
Nodder snorted. “Bah. They do it because there’s no trouble with the prisoners this way. And they need scarcely any personnel to deal with them.”
Candle tried to remember Nodder’s file. The guy had a PhD of some kind. Bio/logics? “What’d I bust you for?” Candle asked. “I’m still a bit fuzzy.”
“You don’t remember? I sure as hell do. But they put me in a regular jail. Where the big boys and girls go.”
Shortstack and Rina laughed at that.
Nodder went on, “Bank hacking, my good man. A gentleman’s crime. Steal from the rich, give to the poor.”
“The gentlemen criminals don’t get caught,” Shortstack observed. “Or they don’t get prosecuted, anyhow.”
“You have a point,” Nodder said. He went to a songbox, and ran the tip of a finger over its selector. Frank Sinatra started singing that “The Lady Is a Tramp.”
“You seen Danny?” Rina asked.
“That was my next question,” Candle said. “You seen him?”
“Not for awhile,” she said, wiping the bar. “But he’s somewhere around. Maybe over in Rooftown. Seems like I heard something. You can ask there. The little prick, he shoulda met you at the jail when you got out.”
Candle gave out a grunt that meant, Yeah, but. “Maybe he didn’t know.”
“Seems like he did know, Candle. He should’ve come.”
Candle gave out a grunt that meant, Yeah, but .... “I’m guessing he’s still using. He knows I’d know, after two minutes, whatever he said. I’d know if he was using—and he doesn’t want to hear about it from me.”
There could be another reason Danny didn’t come, Candle figured. It was a reason Candle didn’t like to think about. Danny could be so sucked in he’d become a “V-rat.” Incapable of uncoupling. A shrunken thing wired into a machine like a shriveled, twitching embryo growing inside a meth whore.
“He should’ve been there anyway, after what you did, taking the fall for him,” Nodder said, taking a stim-patch from a pocket and pressing it to his wrist. Something to keep the nods at bay.
“He didn’t have a clean record like me—he wouldn’t have done his time in UnMinding. He’d have done time with the assholes. No offense, Nodder. I don’t mean you.”
“I’ve been there,” Nodder reminded him, “I know who’s there. But you know what? You busted me about six months before you took Danny’s rap—and I got out two years sooner than you!”
“Yeah—you got out sooner than the cop!” Shortstack crowed.
The “Aztec” turned, settling his yellowed, baleful gaze on Candle. “You a cop?”
“Used to be.”
“You can’t sit here, used-to-be-cop. You go away. Hate cops.”
“He’s my guest, Paco,” Nodder said.
“I am sorry to kill your guest then,” the Aztec said, standing, in a wobbly sort of way beside his stool. He reached into his coat.
Candle grabbed for his own service revolver—and then realized he didn’t have one. “Shit!”
Then Rina was suddenly behind the Aztec, tapping him on the shoulder. The Aztec spun to face her—a flurry of her small hands and the Aztec’s gun went flying over his shoulder. Candle caught it in mid-air: a charged .32. He reversed it, brought its butt expertly down on the Aztec’s head, and the man started to crumple. Candle caught him in his arms, dragged him to a chair, slumped the unconscious man over the table.
Maybe I haven’t lost my nerve, Candle thought, straightening up. Anyway my reflexes still work.
“I should chuck ol’ Aztec Paco there out on the sidewalk,” Nodder said, yawning, scratching his belly.
“No need.” Candle put the gun in an inside coat pocket. “He was just drunk. But I’ll keep his shooter. I need one.” He looked at Rina who was casually picking up a couple of dirty glasses, as if that’s all she’d come out from behind the bar for. “Rina—thanks.”
“Yeah, sure, I don’t know why I do nothing nice for you, you so stupid. Could have gone with me, but you rather lose four years. What a dumb bastard.”
“Could be you’re right.” He turned to Shortstack. “So. We have some kind of business to do or ... what?”
Shortstack nodded. “Yeah. We got urgent business. Why you think got your testicles out of the goddamn waver? Risk getting our hands burned? Huh? It’s urgent we talk. It’s life-and-death, hode. But first things first—another drink.”
REPRESENT, HODE,
YA CHAPTER FIVE—
GOTTA MAKE THE MOMENT COME ALIVE
Spanx banged up the rickety stairs into the lowest level of Rooftown.
Spanx was shaped “like a stick insect,” or so his sister Willow had said. His jeans were so tight on his skinny legs they looked spray-painted on, his boots so covered with duct tape he couldn’t tell anymore—and couldn’t remember—if they were leather or rubber; his Danny Candle T-shirt so long-unwashed and unchanged it had its own pores, he figured, its own epidermis; his frizzed out electric-shock bleached white hair was like an exotic fungus in the process of eating his head. High arching eyebrows, weak chin, hooking nose, hollow cheeks, almost lipless. Big earrings. Spanx. Clambering up, talking to himself.
“Climbing fucking trash mountain,” he was saying. “Fucking Trash Mountain, hode.”
The stairs were made out of old plastic milk crates, wired together around scavenged vertical steel support pipes that ran through the hollowed-out building; a circa-1970s building whose interior floors had all collapsed into a pile of rubble below. Above it reared Rooftown. scavenged and cobbled together. Spanx was still underneath most of Rooftown, its foundation a sprawling group of old steel-girder buildings in downtown L.A—former apartment buildings, failed hotels, a ten-story parking garage, a few office buildings. The buildings had been damaged by the 7.8 earthquake of 2020, externally too damaged to retrofit. But their steel frames were still sound enough to support the community that had grown up on top. And every time the real estate industry got interested in the neighborhood again, the Rooftown community let it be known that once evicted they would promptly move en masse to the best parts of town. “Try arresting us all.” A bluff? Maybe. But for now—stalemate.
Rooftown knew it wouldn’t last; knew the community and the structure wouldn’t last. Everyone could see its fragility, and Spanx felt its cranky, swaying, creaking transience through the soles of his boots. He’d heard rumors the Matriarch was going to lock it down, not let anyone from outside in at all. But maybe that wasn’t happening yet. He didn’t want to ask the Matriarch’s permission to get in. She scared him.
Spanx was on a mission to find Danny Candle. There was a gig to be played. There was potential money. Feeling “on a mission” with every step, Spanx followed the zigzag stairs up through a hole broken in the concrete roof. He emerged into the open air, walked across a ramp made of an old steel door to a corner of the building platform where an antique, jerry-rigged elevator, cadged from the remnants of a decrepit old hotel, wobbled its way down to him through a metal-mesh shaft. The shaft was tentatively attached by U-shaped hardened-plastic braces to the concrete wall of the higher, adjacent building. The vibration of the descending elevator transmitted to the mesh causing the bolts in the braces to grind about loosely in their drill holes, threatening to pop out.
“Might be the time has finally come for the collapse,” Spanx muttered to himself. His ho-buddies had been giving him crap about talking to himself for awhile now, since he’d started doing the rotters—the rotorstims. But he couldn’t bring himself to switch them off.
He rode up in the squealing, open elevator, the wind off the buildings coming through the bars to parch his mouth; he rode up and up, foot by slow creaking foot, licking his lips, laughing at his own fear; muttering. “Listen to your heart pound, hode! It’s banging inside this metal tube you in, dumb shitter-shatter fuck. Whole thing going to crash down any second
. Your heart beating so much it sets up vibration, like that butterfly theory thing ...” He had to work up some saliva to keep talking, his mouth was so dry. His mouth stayed open, operating a lot. “... and it send that vibration outta your chest and the heartbeat gets, like, all into this elevator and goes into those bolts–” He turned his head to look in fascination at the bolts grinding sexily into the supporting building, bits of grit falling from the holes, a little more with each passage of the elevator. “—and those bolts get loose and—WHOA DAMN!—the whole thing falls and it knocks into those supports–” He turned to point, for no one but himself, at the underpinnings of the cross structure, like a tree-house that spanned two trees, connecting the building that held the elevator up and the unwieldy, visibly swaying superstructure of Rooftown rising from an old office building across the street. “—knock right into those puppies and knock ’em down and the whole thing comes down with it, ba-boom-ba-boom, house of cards, down she goes, couple three, maybe four thousand people up there ...” Were there that many? No one knew. Just seemed like it was always teeming with people. “... and they go crashing down, all, like, ‘YAHHHHHHHH! MOMMEEEEE!’ and ... any second now ... any fucking second ... I can feel it GO-IIIIIIINNNNG!” He laughed, delighted at the picture of it: he saw it quite clearly in his mind’s eye. “All, like, a movie. Watch it go down! ‘YAHHHH!’”
But the antique lift had resisted the vibrations of his thudding heart, Spanx saw, and the elevator cabin came wheezing to a stop at the upper end of its metal-mesh shaft, and he struggled, as usual, to get the rusty old gate open, the gate that always reminded him of a portable playpen, accordion made out of Xs. Finally it slid aside, the Xs contracting, pinching skin off his thumb.
Sucking at his bleeding thumb, Spanx said, “Shitter-shatter!” and stepped through onto the walkway, which was made of slats of wood attached by wire to a couple of metal ladders laid down flat between the elevator and the undercarriage of Rooftown. The “undercarriage”, as residents called it, was actually a metal tower that had fallen from the top of one of the buildings during the earthquake, to make an accidental bridge across two others. Rooftown squatters occupying the other buildings had started building across the tower, with beams and other materials from collapsed structures. Layer on layer had been added, old and new materials ... And now Spanx jogged along a catwalk that swung under his tread; he hurried along the outside of the undercarriage, up to a series of ladders and steps. “Not handicapped accessible, that’s for fuck’s sure,” he said, and some of the scarecrow kids climbing around in the timbers overhead laughed and agreed and threw wood chips at him. “Hey hey hey you you you kids-ids are gonna, all, like, fall and shit!” Spanx called, more enjoying the concept than warning them. Sometimes they did fall, some of them. A few people fell every week from Rooftown. Sometimes more than a few. Eventually their bodies were cleared away by robotic street sweepers—the bodies the Rooftowners didn’t retrieve. The Rooftowners liked a good funeral. There were mummified bodies sealed into the walls of derelict buildings on this side of the street.